[jle17]

> I don't trust Poetteringware. Poettering's team has a record of foisting technology on users, resulting in the need for e.g. the Devuan fork.

They have been developing software, that enough people have deemed useful to include it in their distributions. Some have disagreed, and have made other choices. No one was forced to do anything, there have been no "foisting" and the "need" for Devuan is a subjective opinion.

There is really no need to transform purely technical arguments into personal attacks. This just discourages participating into free software development.

[lmm]

Systemd was designed in a way that was more tightly coupled than the alternatives and made adopting it an all-or-nothing proposition, and other projects (particularly Gnome) were also tightly coupled to it. It was absolutely foisted on people: a lot of people didn't want it but found they were nevertheless obliged to install it. The whole thing abused the goodwill of the free software community: systemd folks added systemd-dependent patches to other software, taking advantage of the norm of accepting such contributions, while refusing patches that made systemd compatible with other systems (e.g. non-Linux). And the end result was a state where you can no longer fork and replace components piecemeal - the whole free software ethos, the very reason GNU was built as a Unix-like system in the first place - which does far more to discourage participating in free software development than any mere internet argument.

[jle17]

The tight coupling, the non-portability, all of that are technical choices, that can be debated on their own merit without the need to attribute malevolent intentions to the developers.

Projects merged changes because they wanted them, not because their goodwill was abused to make them merge anything. People got systemd on their OSes because they chose OSes whose developers chose to move to systemd.

It's not like Lennart comes to your home with a gun if you install OpenBSD.

[hdjjhhvvhga]

> There is really no need to transform purely technical arguments into personal attacks. This just discourages participating into free software development.

While I agree with you in general, for some reason this particular developer tends to take decisions that have very extensive consequences and make choice extremely difficult.

[kevincox]

A developer that has been able to make tough choices and drive them well enough to get mass adoption?

He definitely isn't perfect but this sounds like quite the feat in Open Source.

[denton-scratch]

I didn't make a personal attack on Poettering; my objection is to the software his team produces. And I wasn't making any technical argument; I don't know enough about TPM and secure boot to do that.

My point was a political one, I guess: this is more software that runs very deep in the system, coming from a team that has a record of producing software that is hard to opt-out of.

For PulseAudio on Debian, you have to take firm steps to ensure the package manager doesn't reinstall it. Much the same goes for systemd. I assume it will be much harder to opt-out of a secure boot released by that team. I believe that's on purpose: they could have made it easier to run without those packages, if they'd wanted to. I think it's clear that they wanted the opposite.

[carapace]

You are completely missing the point.

Please don't fan this flame.